FamilySite
Have been getting started into this project for class. The rest of the group seems to be eager to work on it, too. Shouldn't be too hard to get it done in a semester.

Java Regexps
Either I'm too dense to figure out the trick to it or it's not possible, but I can't parse anything using Java's regexp classes. Match and replace, sure, but I can't parse. Hopefully one of Jakarta's twoprojects will do what I want.

Life
I've been playing phone-tag with a girl for what seems like forever, maybe this week we'll actually do something together. Also trying to get 5 guys to look at a house at the same time; not an easy task.

brondsema.net
Just switched hosts to the same as splike.com, which is a good thing. Now that I can do PHP/db stuff, I've already set up Gallery (which is very nice) and soon will redesign the whole thing.

lehrig: I can't (or am too stupid to) post a reply to your article. You may want to look into SDL It doesn't appear to support OpenVMS (but I may be wrong) and it supports threads/mutexes/etc and timers.

Books
Went to the school library today and was surprised by the extent of Comp Sci books they have available. I wish I had a few days where I could just sit up there and read. I checked out 2 books by Knuth and a Java Swing book.

Native Qt for Windowskde-cygwin.sf.net's port has been moving along quickly. I found out the hard way that qt can't be compiled with bison, but must us byacc as the yacc-replacement. I've only been following along via anonymous CVS and the mailing list, but I hope to help out in the future.

Mexico
Got back from my January-term class in Mexico. A lot of fun and I learned stuff, too. First real use of my digital camera (Powershot A40) and I got a lot of good pictures and videos. Now to figure out what server/host I should use to install Gallery and post my pictures.

Native Qt for Windows
I got an email from a maintainer of kde-cygwin.sf.net about a port of Qt to native use native windows instead of cygwin's single-window X server. This is very similar to my project. I haven't done much on my project yet, so when I do have time to work on it, I'll probably work with kde-cygwin instead of doing my own port.

Java
Still working on a Java application for fun for searching our school's student data.

School
2nd semester begins tomorrow and I have a busy schedule so most of my programming time will be for class or work. So sad..

Just got Java to do a HTTP POST over SSL and maintain cookies. Gotta love code reuse. Just imagine having to write ALL the code to do that from scratch. It'd take months to do, instead of just an hour.

I am developing a Java application to search our school's user database. The existing web search only searches by name, so this application will "harvest" all the data from the web search results into a database for the application.

Uses Sshtools' j2ssh API to retrieve an /etc/passwd file so it has a list of usernames.

Uses hsqldb as the JDBC driver to store all the data in regular files. (No database setup for the user required).

Been learning php in a very sporadic manner. I know what I want to do and I know plenty of similar languages, so I've just been doing lots of googling (and asking friends) to find out the right syntax, etc. It's fun stuff. Seems pretty good, but it'll take a while to make the code look nice.

Tried to set up slackware and then debian on an old 120mhz machine, but I think the hard drive has too many bad sectors. Oh well.

Been using the digital camera a lot lately. I really like it.

Found several sourceforge & freshmeat projects for bookmark merging and/or synchronization. Hopefully one will do everything I want (IE, mozilla, phoenix bookmark merging and synchronization).

I'm looking forward to finishing up this semester's exams because that means I can fix work on my website, create a Java people-search program for Calvin students, relax, celebrate Christmas and then go to Mexico for January.

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser
code is live. It needs further work but already handles most
markup better than the original parser.